Richard Spencer is one of the Daily Telegraph's Middle East correspondents. Married with three children, he was previously news editor, and then China correspondent for six years. He is based in Cairo.

When my mother met Hilary

Last year my parents came to visit me in Beijing, taking the trans-Siberian express from Moscow via Irkutsk and Ulan Bator. That's the sort of thingparents do these days.

Mongolians have a fashion sense, thanks very much

My mother told us that while in Mongolia she had looked out of a minibus (they stopped for a stay) and seen someone suspiciously like Hilary Alexander, our fashion editor, taking photographs of women in unusual clothes on the steppe. I said this seemed most unlikely and she must havebeen dreaming or have drunk too much airag (see web log July 10).

It turns out from her blog, inspired by my presence in Mongolia, that Hilary was indeed in Ulan Bator and indeed all over Mongolia last year. The worldis indeed a smaller place than it used to be. My mother knew what Hilary looked like, apart from the fact that's she's also a tv star, because theymet at a village fete in Somerset once. That would have seemed much more normal for Telegraph types once, but no longer.

One of the other journalists wandering around the 800th anniversary festivities for the founding of Mongolia turns out to be a teenager on his gap year putting in a few months at the English-language Ulan Bator Post. Did people do that sort of thing in my day, which I've never thought of asbeing that long ago? I thought hitch-hiking in Africa was outre.

Anyway, enough of that self-referentiality. (Perhaps).

Today, I met a leading opposition politician in Mongolia, Sanjaasuren Oyun, normally known just as Oyun. She is something of a darling of the western think-tanks and investors, being an intelligent, articulate (and English-speaking) advocate of democratic and economic reform.

She did a PhD in geology at Cambridge in the 1990s, and went on to work for Rio Tinto (or RTZ or whatever Rio Tinto Zinc is now formally known as). Buther life was changed one day in 1998 when her brother, Zorig, was stabbed to death in his apartment in UB. The killers were never caught, but the mostlikely explanation was that as an MP he was trying to block a corrupt casino deal.

Zorig had led the pro-democracy protests in 1989 that, as elsewhere in the Soviet bloc (but not China) eventually swept away the old communist order.(In a way; the communist party, the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, transformed itself into a social democratic party and is now back in power).There's a statue of Zorig now, looking very approachable with his glasses, book and cigarette stub, just off Ulan Bator's main square.

Zorig's statue

Mrs Oyun came back for the funeral and was persuaded to stay on and take up her brother's mantle. It's been a difficult path – there is a differencebetween fighting for democracy and coping with the complexities and compromises of first past the post elections once you've won it,particularly when they ended up in a dead heat in the last one.

She stands resolutely for lower taxes, foreign investment and all the other things that have helped globalisation around the world but which, in thelight of Mongolia's economic difficulties since the reforms began, have been easy to criticise.

As with the globalisation of China's economy, it's hard to see what the alternative is. Protection is very easily turned into the protection ofspecial interests (and their political friends) that need no protecting from anybody. But it's rather remarkable that a country like Mongolia, where theroads peter out into pot-holes and thousands of people live on the street should be slashing corporate and personal taxes (except for a controversialwindfall tax on copper and gold mining).

I hope her optimism about the future, that the tax cuts, anti-corruption bills and the like will eventually pay off, is justified. Correction,actually: I think we should all hope her optimism is justified, because even if small, a country that embraces change and has the courage to see itthrough could be a good model for all of us.

One hopes the nomads can profit from it too. Perhaps with more globalised fashion shoots, Somerset tourists etc they will be able to.And, I have to admit, me. I have also taken my family on holiday to Mongolia, including to Lake Khuvsgol. If I were back in Beijing, I mighthave been able to post a picture of my daughters sitting on possibly the very same reindeer as Hilary's model. (Except they were not in weddingdresses, by Julien Macdonald or anyone else).